They are the tongue-in-cheek version of the hit books which once informed children how the world really works.

Now the latest volumes of the much-loved Ladybird books, written for adults who grew up with the series, have stormed to the top of the literary charts after selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Sales figures released by publishing data company Nielsen Book revealed that How It Works: The Husband is number one in the Christmas charts, followed by last year’s chart-topper, the Guinness Book Of World Records.

The tongue-in-cheek Ladybird guide to The Husband has reached number one in the Christmas book chart beating The Guinness Book Of World Records

The Ladybird volume explains how husbands can remember football scores and all his old car number plates – but ‘cannot remember what his wife asked him to bring back from the shops’.

Other new How It Works titles include the Wife, the Hangover and the Mid-Life Crisis.

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The books were penned by comedians Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley, and carry illustrations from the Ladybird archive of the 1960s and 1970s.

They are an affectionate, if adult, homage to the original Ladybird books which taught children how a car or rocket might work.

Only 15,000 copies were printed when Penguin took a punt on the books by the pair, who have written for comedy shows on terrestrial television.

Now in the run up to Christmas, more than 600,000 copies from the spoof range have sold, with some shops running out of stock.

The series of books were penned by comedians Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley, and carry illustrations from the Ladybird archive of the 1960s and 1970s

Morris said they had fond memories of the originals: ‘A lot of effort had gone into them. As a kid you felt a bit special being given one.

‘It’s like being allowed to mess about with a national treasure,’ he said. ‘It’ s like repainting St Paul’s.’

The Husband book is clearly proving a popular stocking filler and has sold 170,660 copies in total, making it the 31st best-selling book of the year.

The success of the new titles is a tribute to the mastery of the originals. In its heyday, Ladybird employed 25 full-time illustrators, giving an idea of the sheer scale of the operation.

NEW LADYBIRD GUIDE TO LAUGHS

How It Works: The Husband

He can remember football scores, all his old car number plates and most of the film Withnail And I. But he cannot remember what his wife asked him to bring back from the shops. This is because his brain is full up, not because he was not listening.

How It Works: The Wife

Wives like to be right. Sara has been waiting for her husband, Tom, to arrive. He is half an hour late. Sara is delighted. She knew this would happen.

Book Of The Mid-Life Crisis

Joe's body used to agree with him. It used to agree that his shirt fitted, that he could manage another pint, that he would be awake when the train reached his station, and that he had finished relieving himself. Now Joe’s body disagrees with him on all these things.

Book Of Dating

Lonely people know ‘the one’ is out there somewhere. They will search the whole world for them. It is surprising how often that soulmate turns out not to be on the other side of the world, but fairly nearby and reasonably drunk. The perfect match.

Book Of Mindfulness

‘There is more wisdom in a waterfall than there is in a hundred men,’ says Jake. Jake is always saying things like this. His ex-wife’s sister calls him Jerk.

Book Of The Hangover

What a confusing world it can seem with a hangover. Sit as still as you can. Do not attempt to make any decisions. Look out of the window. Can you recognise simple shapes or colours? Is there a moon or sun in the sky? What sort of name might you have? Where might there be bacon?

Between 1940 and 1980, the company published 646 separate books — that’s one every three weeks.

Most were pocket-sized, measuring roughly 4½in by 7in, and comprised 56 pages — a format chosen because a complete book could be printed on a ‘quad crown’, a large standard sheet of paper 40in by 30in, which was then folded and cut to size.

The remarkable efficiency of this operation meant that the books stayed the same price, 2/6 (12.5p) for almost three decades.

Looking back through the original Ladybirds is to glimpse a world long gone in this age of iPads and Islamic terrorism.

In the Sixties People At Work series, men do almost all the jobs — The Airman, The Builder, The Farmer, The Fireman, The Policeman, The Postman and The Soldier. Women do get one title to themselves, The Nurse, but even here ‘the doctors tell the nurses what to do’.

The science books show young children making fire with magnifying glasses, using pliers to strip a battery of its casing and whittling wood with a penknife. Can you imagine any of today’s publishers risking the wrath of Health and Safety that way?

Equally, the How It Works series looks impossibly quaint from our high-tech eyrie. A computer taking up half a room is called ‘small’, and the 1972 Story Of Nuclear Power depicts Sellafield (then named Windscale) with blue skies and happy seagulls — an image clouded by Chernobyl and Fukushima.

And, despite the post-war influx of immigrants from our former colonies, the first non-white faces don’t appear until the Sixties — and even then they’re usually in the background.

‘The reason we can now look back and say, “Oh how funny, how quaint, how politically incorrect, how wrong” is because the books lasted,’ says Ladybird enthusiast Helen Day. ‘If it was a teaching manual or something dry and dusty, it would have gone into the attic or chucked away and that would have been it.’

Comedy writers Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, the brains behind the new Ladybirds, are in their mid-40s and childhood devotees of the originals.

Hazeley says: ‘I loved these books growing up. I learned to read through them. As a kid, you felt a bit special being given one.

'They were just brilliant: positive, comforting, but opinionated in a very British way. There’s one which says, “Queen Victoria was not very clever.” I love how matter-of-fact that is.’

It’s a style the duo — who have written for TV comedians Miranda Hart and Mitchell and Webb — have tried to emulate, albeit with a dry, modern twist. In their new title The Wife, for example, one picture shows a young bride cutting the wedding cake with her husband.

The caption reads: ‘Tina is getting married. It is the best day of her life. Next year, she will claim that becoming a mother was the best day of her life, but only because she was on some very strong drugs.

‘Neither is true. The best day of her life was her eighth birthday, when she got a yellow bike.’

Hazeley says: ‘The extraordinary thing about that one is that unbeknown to us, it actually happened. The bride in the picture was a woman named Jenny Keen, whose father, Douglas, was the driving force behind the original Ladybird books.

In the run up to Christmas, more than 600,000 copies from the spoof range have sold, with some shops running out of stock

‘She got in touch after we’d written ours to tell us that not only had she been given a bike for her eighth birthday, but that her marriage hadn’t lasted very long and she had much happier memories of the bike than of the husband!’

The spirit of Douglas Keen’s love for the series burns bright in the new books, with their images from Ladybird’s 11,000-strong collection of illustrations and the easy-to-read typeface.

Morris says: ‘It’s like being allowed to mess about with a national treasure, like repainting St Paul’s [Cathedral]’, while Hazeley stresses that the new series is pastiche rather than parody.

‘Parody is savage; pastiche is affectionate,’ he says.

‘That’s why we use the word “grown-up” rather than “adult”. “Grown-up” is the word children use. “Adult” sounds like seedy men in the doorways of shops with blacked-out windows.’

The dedication to each of the eight books says ‘the authors would like to thank the illustrators whose work they have so mercilessly ribbed, and whose glorious craftsmanship was the set-dressing of their childhoods. The inspiration they sparked has never faded.’

Indeed not. And if the success of the new titles is anything to go by, they’ll be part of our national fabric for some time yet.